Broken Tongues in Dialogue: Translation and the Body in Slow Man

Abstract

Coetzee stages a blatantly failed example of translation, in which the target language never attempts to have any claim to the original meaning-an instance of contact between different languages that does not end in a seamless transfer of semantic content. [...]ideally, reading Sloio Man in a language other than English, or translating it into another language, will mean providing one more language that can inter- act with the languages the novel stages.